Contents

The Kano computer system revolves around two core things: a Raspberry Pi and the Kano OS designed for it. More than just another Raspberry Pi kit, it proved itself with a successful Kickstarter, promising a system that would help get kids into real computing and allow them to start down a path of programming and coding.

Server

Guill, a recent graduate of the masters in computer science and electrical engineering program at the University of Texas in Dallas, built the 40-node Raspberry Pi cluster for distributed software testing. In addition to a list of technical requirements, Guill wrote that he also wanted it to be “visually pleasing.”

I’ve done a lot of support of government servers and they run for about forever, as in until they serve no further use. Even retired, old servers are often repurposed and put back into service due to budget restrictions and/or long lead times to order new equipment under the required procedures for government procurement. In the United States this is especially true at the state level. When a server is repurposed it is usually reloaded with the current enterprise standard Linux distrubution release and applications, not legacy releases. That’s one common use case.

We recently visited Linux creator Linus Torvalds at his home office where we talked about The Linux Foundation’s ‘Introduction to Linux’ edX MOOC course, the way he works (more to come on this in the coming weeks) and Mean Tweets.

Topping the Linux news this evening is a look at the five most popular Linux distributions by ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Also tonight, Jennifer Cloer asks Linus Torvalds about the meanest tweets he’s received. And finally tonight, Jack M. Germain looks at Deepin Linux and Jack Wallen asks if Cinnamon is a worthy replacement for Unity?

This week at the Network Virtualization and SDN World event in London I’ve had many people ask me some variation of, ‘how is OpenDaylight doing?’ or ‘how are things progressing?’. To answer those questions, I must implicitly answer a different one: how do you judge the success of an open source project like OpenDaylight?

Fallout from the many changes introduced early on in the Linux 3.15 kernel cycle are almost all addressed and this next kernel release should happen in the very near future. As some last minute work are some notable fixes for the Intel and Radeon DRM graphics drivers.

Last week when Mesa 10.2 RC4 was released it was expected to be the final development version and to ship the official release of Mesa 10.2 on Friday, 30 May. The official release didn’t happen but Mesa 10.2 RC5 is out there now with the hopes of shipping the final release next week.

The new driver from NVIDIA is quite an impressive one and it covers some new GPU models and numerous bug fixes for various issues and bugs.

NVIDIA has three distinct driver versions that are aimed at various users and products, but this Short Lived Branch is the most updated one. This is where the NVIDIA developers make the first updates for their products and it’s also the version that receives improvements for games and applications.

Benchmarks

This week there’s already been a high-end OpenGL comparison using the latest proprietary drivers with newer AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. Those OpenGL results were followed by a 2D NVIDIA/AMD Linux performance comparison and now to end out the week are some OpenCL compute benchmarks.

I got an interesting email from Michael A. Marks the technical director for Aspyr Media who built his own steambox and ran some OpenGL tests with interesting results.

Before you read too far into it just bear in mind that Michael knows what he is talking about given he’s worked on some AAA titles like Call of Duty & Civilization in the porting process from DirectX to OpenGL.

On Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon, the update manager has received an enhanced design and new features, now showing more information, it does not lock the APT cache at startup anymore and does not check for an internet connection anymore. Also, Cinnamon 2.2.0 has been implemented, coming with a redesigned UI for the System Settings, the Hot Corners features better settings, the menu applet got a few new options, MPRIS support has been added by default, the HiDPI/Retina display support has been implemented and the window manager has received enhancements.

Last but not least, here is my report from the Krita 2014 sprint. It was the fourth Krita sprint and the first one since the previous sprint 2011. In terms of Krita development that a really long time and quite a lot happened since then. After the last sprint in Amsterdam the sprint location was once again in Deventer. As usual the sprint was again very productive and generally fantastic with lots of old faces and some new ones.

Amarok is one of the most famous music players on the Linux platform and it’s been around for more than a decade. It’s integrated by default in KDE, which might have contributed to its fame, but it’s definitely one of the most interesting alternatives.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

I have tried to describe a situation where Web browsing is more tightly integrated with the desktop. There is still a lot of work to do: detailed functionality needs to be refined, assumptions need to be verified, mockups and prototypes need to be created and evaluated…

A browser is a very complex application to design, but luckily there is a lot of knowledge already available that should help us generate ideas and make informed decisions.

I’ve deliberately not included GNOME in this sweep, as a lot of the core GNOME applications already have AppData and most of the gnomies already know what to do. I also didn’t include XFCE appications, as XFCE has agreed to adopt AppData on the mailing list and are in the process of doing this already. KDE is just working out how to merge the various files created by Matthias, and I’ve not heard anything from LXDE or MATE. So, I only looked at projects not affiliated with any particular desktop.

This is the first update for GNOME Shell in the current 3.13.x development cycle, and its makers have made quite a few modifications to it.

According to the changelog, the airplane mode menu is now insensitive in the lock screen, the struts are no longer extended to the screen edge, keynav has been fixed for alternatives in AltSwitcher, and the window menus have been implemented in the shell.

Tartan is a new research and development project by Collabora to yield a Clang analysis plug-in for GLib and GNOME.

The Tartan plug-in loads GObject-Introspection meta-data for all encountered functions to better inform LLVM’s Clang and the plug-in also takes care of detecting common coding practices for GLib. Tartan is licensed under the GPLv3+ by Collabora.

This latest update for GTK arrives with a multitude of changes and new features, but this is understandable because this is a development release.

According to the changelog, interactive debugging support has been implemented, gesture support has finally landed, the GTK+ widgets can now draw outside their allocation zone, by setting a clip with gtk_widget_set_clip(), GtkStack has added a few more transition types, and the GtkProgressBar is now narrower.

The latest update to Kali Linux was released a few days ago. Kali Linux 1.0.7 review is a summary review of the main features of this latest upgrade to the security distribution from Offensive Security, a security and penetration training outfit based somewhere on this third rock from the Sun.

The main feature introduced in Kali Linux 1.0.7 is the ability to transfer the system to a USB stick with encrypted persistence.

Sure, on the desktop, Windows still rules. According to Stat Counter’s’ April 2014 data, Windows has about a 90 percent market share. Out of an approximate base of 1.5 billion PCs, that’s about 1.36 billion Windows PCs. So, guess what’s the number two end-user operating system in the world?

“Simplicity Linux 14.7 Alpha is now available for download in Netbook, Desktop and X Editions. It is based on Precise Puppy and uses the excellent LXPup by SFS to provide LXDE as a desktop environment for Netbook and Desktop Editions. As usual, Netbook is our cut down version which focuses on web based applications rather than locally installed applications,” said the developer in the official announcement.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the June 2014 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

Fedora

Debian Family

Tails is a distribution based on Debian and Tor technologies that aims to keep its users as anonymous as possible. It gained a lot more visibility after Edward Snowden said that he used exactly this Linux distribution to hide his tracks. The developers are now implementing more changes and fixes that should ensure it becomes even more secure.

Earlier this month the Siduction team, which regularly updates snapshots based on Debian Unstable/Sid, released a development build showcasing the new LXQt desktop, the future of both the LXDE and the Razor-qt environments. Siduction have a bit of history here as they featured Razor-qt as a desktop early on and were probably the only distribution to ship a dedicated iso as part of their line-up throughout 2012 and 2013. Besides using KDE 4 for the main image Siduction have shown a great commitment to medium light and lower resource desktops.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

If there’s one area of Linux that gets more scrutiny than any other, it’s the desktop. From every corner, the haters and detractors abound. Nearly every publication that offers any focus on the Linux desktop at some point posts a piece about getting rid of the default Ubuntu desktop. Cinnamon is one of the primary replacement contenders.

Ubuntu developers are trying to shake some of its GNOME dependencies and they have been working towards this goal for quite some time. Ubuntu distributions have been using GNOME packages since the beginning, even before the adoption of Unity as the default desktop environment.

Back when Ubuntu was still using GNOME 2.x to power its desktop, people were complaining about various problems, which in fact were not the fault of the Ubuntu developers. Some of the patches submitted by Ubuntu upstream, to the GNOME project were accepted either with delay or not at all. So, Canonical has decided to make Unity, a project it can control from one end to another.

Flavours and Variants

The Deepin desktop design is snazzy yet simple to use. It is one of the first Linux distros to take advantage of HTML 5 technology.

Add its home-grown applications such as the Deepin Software Center, Deepin Music Player and Deepin Media Player, and you get an operating system that is tailored to the average user.

The Deepin Linux development team is based in China. The distro so far is available only in English and traditional or simplified Chinese. It is a very young distro that debuted a few years ago and cycled through just one or two full releases per year as it crawled through its alpha and beta stages.

Deepin 2014 Beta is the latest version, released earlier this month to replace a version released last fall. This current release, based on screen shots displayed on the website for the previous version, substitutes the more traditional bottom panel bar with a docking bar that resembles the Mac OS X look.

The new Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and the first flavors released are Cinnamon and MATE, which is the norm for this kind of launches.

It’s important to note right from the start that the ISOs for the two versions of Linux Mint 17 usually arrive before the official announcement, which is not too far off. Rest assured, these are the official images from the Linux Mint Team.

The ISOs approved for Linux Mint 17 aka Qiana stable release are already uploaded and available for download. The release hasn’t been announced yet but here’s your chance to install and enjoy the latest version of the popular Ubuntu derivative! 32 and 64-bit versions of both the Cinnamon and MATE variants are available.

When you buy a Synology product, you know what you’re getting yourself in to. The company’s designs rarely change between generations, beyond a few small tweaks and improvements to the internals, and its Linux-based DiskStation Manager operating system only ever improves with time. Its pricing, however, can leave it out of the reach of the budget-conscious buyer, especially when more than two drive bays are required.

The Linaro Digital Home Group, or LHG, follows other working groups from Linaro, a not-for-profit company owned by ARM and many of its top licensees. Linaro develops standardized open source Linux and Android toolchain software for ARM-based devices. Previous groups have included the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG), the Linaro Networking Group (LNG), and most recently, the Security Working Group (SWG).

As usual, the goal is provide standardized software and requirements for relevant upstream open source projects. In this case, Linaro defines digital home applications as media-centric devices including set-top boxes, televisions, media players, gaming, and home gateway devices. Home automation does not appear to be a central focus.

Phones

Though it’s difficult to compare two operating systems that are targeted at different users, Mozilla’s Firefox OS still feels half-baked compared to what Ubuntu offers. While Canonical is focused on making a full-fledged mobile OS that goes head-to-head against Android and iOS, Firefox’s approach is towards making smartphones more affordable. Initial reviews of Firefox OS have been really underwhelming so it will take about a year for us to see both operating systems in the hands of its end users. Finally, it would be a great idea to wait till both operating systems get enough exposure and that would be somewhere around April 2015 where both Ubuntu and Firefox would have (hopefully) reached enough stability to be used on a broader scale.

WebRTC voice and video is now available on Firefox Nightly. That’s the latest news from the Mozilla Foundation and TokBox, the Web communications company that Mozilla Foundation is working with to bring us WebRTC voice and video in my favorite Web browser. To see how this actually works, I decided to download Firefox Nightly and install or run it on my systems.

Ballnux

Samsung’s first generation of smartwatches is officially ditching Android. SamMobile reports that the original Galaxy Gear is being upgraded to Tizen, the operating system used on the newer Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo (but not the Gear Fit, yet another model released this spring.) Samsung has made a point of differentiating its software from stock Android — its various Android smartphones are loaded with design tweaks — but in this case, the main difference will be in added features; we and other reviewers found that the Tizen interface looked and operated very much like the Android one.

With Genode version 14.05, we address two problems that are fundamental for the scalability of the framework. The first problem is the way how Genode interoperates with existing software. A new concept for integrating 3rd-party source code with the framework makes the porting and use of software that is maintained outside the Genode source tree easier and more robust than ever. The rationale and the new concept are explained in Section Management of ported 3rd-party source code. The second problem is concerned about how programs that are built atop a C runtime (as is the case for most 3rd-party software) interact with the Genode world. Section Per-process virtual file systems describes how we consolidated many special-purpose solutions into one coherent design of using process-local virtual file systems.

In line with our road map, we put forward our storage-related agenda by enabling the use of NetBSD’s cryptographic device driver (CGD) on Genode. Thereby, we continue our engagement with the rump kernel that we started to embrace with version 14.02. Section Block-level encryption using CGD explains the use of CGD as a Genode component.

A group of nine research institutes, software development firms and IT companies are building Ossmeter, a platform to evaluate and compare open source software packages and the communities involved in them. The platform will be available as a public service, but the software will also be shared using an open source licence. A study on Ossmeter was published earlier this week by Joinup’s OSOR community.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is gaining a lot of traction in the enterprise IT world, and you have likely heard about some of the big names like Google App Engine, Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Microsoft Azure, but there are also some open source competitors, such as OpenStack, that are worth noting. Since we have already covered OpenStack quite a bit, here are four other open source cloud platforms you might not know.

Women in FOSS

Women make up less than two percent of the open source developer community, according to a 2007 survey by the National Center for Women & Information Technology. The Philadelphia chapter of women’s tech education group Girl Develop It wants to get those numbers up, and it’s starting locally.

I’ve been asked to remove your blog by several people and I’ve reached the conclusion that it would be a really bad idea because it would set the wrong precedence and it would shift the discussion to the wrong topic (censorship yadda yadda). Questioning OPW should be allowed. The problem with your post is that if not questioned by other people (as many have done already) it would send the wrong message to the public and prospect GSoC, OPW and general contributors. Your blog was the wrong place to question and your wording makes it clear that you have misunderstandings about how the community works.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

If you’re not already talking to your web browser, you may soon be doing so. Just last week, we covered Google’s new “OK Google” voice search features in the Chrome browser, which lets you execute searches with spoken words. Now, Mozilla has announced a partnership with TokBox to build WebRTC-based communications features right into its browser. The features could let users exchange real-time data, audio and video between their browsers.

GSOC/FUDCon

Funding

How Canadian governments and law enforcement agencies access telecom data, the benefits of open source Internet tools for business and the purchase of Internet switching gear are among over $1 million in research projects being funded by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority.

BSD

We have covered the LLVMLinux project many times with an increasing number of developers from the x86 and ARM world being interested in building the kernel with Clang. Among the reasons for wanting to build the Linux kernel with Clang is for possible performance advantages, faster kernel compilation times when debugging the kernel, using Clang’s static analysis abilities on the kernel code itself, improving the quality of LLVM and Clang by finding missing/broken compiler features, and improving the overall code quality of the Linux kernel by making the code compatible with more compilers.

Part of the reason why radium snake-oil products proliferated in the years after Marie Curie and her husband first isolated the element is that the Curies refused to patent the process and, in fact, shared it with the world.

They say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. When it comes to adults attempting to explain away inexplicable tragedy by scapegoating the younger generation’s entertainment du jour, that certainly seems to be the case. For our generation, of course, that means video games. We’ve seen it over and over again, from journalists jumping to blame violent games before they have any facts to back it up, to television personalities pretending there’s a proven link when there isn’t, to grandstanding politicians proposing constitution-violating sin-taxes on games just because.

Science

For 11 episodes now, the groundbreaking Fox and National Geographic Channel series Cosmos has been exploring the universe, outraging creationists, and giving science teachers across the nation something to show in class every Monday. In the process, the show has been drawing more than 3 million viewers every Sunday night, a respectable number for a science-focused show that is, after all, a major departure from what prime-time audiences are used to.

Cosmos certainly hasn’t shied from controversy; it has taken on evolution and industry-funded science denial, and it has been devoting an increasing amount of attention to the subject of climate change. And apparently that was just the beginning. This coming Sunday, Cosmos will devote an entire episode to the topic.

Health/Nutrition

Anyone who buys their own groceries (as opposed to having a full-time cook handle such mundane chores) knows that the cost of basic foods keeps rising, despite the official claims that inflation is essentially near-zero.

Consumer products containing ingredients made using an advanced form of engineering known as synthetic biology are beginning to show up more often on grocery and department store shelves.

A liquid laundry detergent made by Ecover, a Belgian company that makes “green” household products including the Method line, contains an oil produced by algae whose genetic code was altered using synthetic biology. The algae’s DNA sequence was changed in a lab, according to Tom Domen, the company’s manager for long-term innovation.

High inflation and low business investment have hampered the government’s recent attempts to boost the economy ahead of the tournament. All this is happening as some of the country’s most pressing social and other problems have been neglected, with rampant poverty and destitution rife in large parts of the capital.

People are up in arms, staging protest events for a number of reasons, the latest of which are centered on skepticism that the lavish spending on the World Cup will benefit them in any substantial way. This Friday, several simultaneous events blocked Rio de Janeiro’s main roads, paralyzing traffic.

Most countries have special-purpose institutions of higher education to train military officers. The United States has 18 such colleges and universities, including federally funded ones such as West Point, state-funded ones such as The Citadel, and private ones such as Norwich University. What distinguishes the United States from all but a few other countries is the presence of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) at civilian colleges and universities.

Created in 1916, ROTC is probably the most visible sign of U.S. military involvement on non-military colleges and universities, with its uniformed cadets and midshipmen and university credit for courses taught by military officers on “military science” and “leadership.” Army, Navy), or Air Force ROTC programs are present today on almost 500 campuses.

Obama said Sloan Gibson, deputy secretary of the VA, would take the helm on an acting basis while he looked “diligently” for a new permanent VA secretary. Gibson, an Army veteran and former banker, had joined the VA just three months ago after running the USO military service organization.

France and the United States have exchanged statements on the Mistral ships contract with Moscow. Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf has said the United States is concerned about the deal and it believes that the time is wrong for selling the amphibious assault ships to the Russian Federation. The statements were made after French President Hollande confirmed that the deal signed in 2011 is in force to be completed in October. The $1, 2 billion Vladivostok is to join the Russian Navy in 2014 with Sevastopol, the second ship of the class, to be delivered in 2015.

According to the nation’s former top counterterrorism official, former President George W. Bush, his Vice President Dick Cheney, and their Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had all committed war crimes during their tenure.

Richard Clarke was Bush’s counterterrorism czar in 2001 and later became the president’s special advisor on cyberterror until he resigned in 2003 and became a vocal critic of the administration. In an interview with Democracy Now! this week, Clarke was asked by host Amy Goodman whether Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld could ever seriously face “war crimes” charges for the Iraq operation.

My arrest at Creech along with eight others on April 16 was a “return to the scene of the crime” (the Air Force’s crime, not mine) for me, as I was among the “Creech 14” in April 2009, the first nonviolent direct action against drones in the U.S. Creech was then one of only a few sites from which drones were controlled by the U.S. and by the United Kingdom, which has a wing of the Royal Air Force stationed there to fly their own drones. Since then the use of armed drones has been proliferating around the world and so has the number of drone operation bases in communities around the U.S. My work with Voices for Creative Nonviolence has brought me to the scenes of the crime in Afghanistan, the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia and at the gates of drone bases in New York, Iowa, Missouri and in England as well.

The Bureau is publishing, for the first time, data showing the types of targets that have been reportedly attacked by CIA drones in Pakistan.

The research is a joint project by the Bureau, Forensic Architecture, a research unit based at Goldsmiths University, London, and Situ Research in New York. The data feeds this interactive website mapping the strikes, the types of target attacked, and their relative scale.

Finally, although President Obama ended the use of torture, he continued the drone attacks started under Bush. A Stanford Law School reports states that “there is significant evidence that U.S. drone strikes have injured and killed civilians.” Many say they violate international law, especially since civilians are killed in countries that haven’t declared war upon the U.S. As for the decisions of presidents before Obama, the use of the atomic bombs, massive bombing campaigns in Vietnam, and chemical weapons like Agent Orange can easily be viewed as war crimes. If President Bush is deemed a war criminal, then the decisions of presidents before and after Bush should be evaluated in the same manner.

President Barack Obama said on Wednesday he will continue to “take direct action” by ordering drone strikes and capture operations against suspected terrorists “when necessary to protect ourselves.”

In a speech outlining a foreign policy framework that stresses cooperation with allies, Obama said there still would be times when the U.S. must go it alone. He restated a policy he disclosed last May, however, that no drone strike should occur unless there is “a near certainty” that no civilians will be harmed.

By way of brief background for the unfamiliar, at the most basic level (but with varying degrees of specificity), each proposal would require the President to release a public report on the number of civilian and combatant casualties killed in U.S. drone strikes (for earlier discussions on the substance of the proposals, see e.g., here and here). Back in November, the House and Senate intelligence committees debated including a similar reporting requirement in the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2014. The SSCI-approved version of the bill included the provisions; whereas, HPSCI rejected a Schiff-sponsored amendment to include the reporting requirements in the House version. Ultimately, however, the proposal was never enacted.

A New York federal appeals court has rejected the government’s request to reargue in secret its order that it reveal a classified memo describing legal justifications for using drones to kill U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism overseas.

After announcing it would comply with a federal court order, the Obama administration has decided that it wants to conceal more portions of a controversial memo authorizing the assassination of Americans overseas.

Last week, officials with the U.S. Department of Justice said they would make public parts of the internal document written in July 2010 by then-federal lawyer David Barron that justified the use of drones or other means to kill U.S. citizens accused of terrorist involvement.

The declaration came as the U.S. Senate was considering Barron’s confirmation as a judicial appointee to the First Circuit Court of Appeals—a move that helped convince at least one Democratic senator, Mark Udall of Colorado, to support the nomination.

Conservatives say, and this is one of their more successful memes, that poor people are immoral. The proles have sex and kids out of wedlock and expect us (i.e., upstanding middle- and upper-class patriots) to pay for them. They steal Medicare and cheat on welfare. They don’t follow The Rules (rules written by, let’s just say, not them). Which makes them Bad.

In his May 28 West Point speech on foreign policy President Obama took a swipe at “so-called realists.” But the acolytes of this particular school of thought will by and large be satisfied with his manifesto. The most scathing attacks on Obama’s foreign policy have come from neo-conservatives such as Robert Kagan. They are the ones who will pounce on the Mr. Obama’s latest address, and indeed have already done so.

The West Point lecture was classic Obama: the president was calm and reasonable. And he took an in-between Goldilocks stance designed to differentiate him from the extremes. The latter he characterized simplistically to supplement the rhetorical force, if not the persuasiveness, of his case.

About two dozen anti-drone protesters greeted those entering the United States Military Academy Wednesday, piggybacking their message onto the fanfare of graduating cadets and a visit by President Barack Obama.

Some light has been shed on how the drone program works; in October 2013, the Washington Post revealed how the NSA is also involved in the targeted killing program. And early in 2014, The Intercept published more details about how “controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies” used by the NSA for its surveillance programs are also used to identify drone targets.

It isn’t just John Major who is unhappy that transcripts and full notes of conversations between Tony Blair and George W Bush about the lead-up to the Iraq war will remain secret. The entire world needs details of conversations between Blair and Bush about the 2003 war, but instead the Chilcot inquiry will only get the gist of the talks. For a war which killed 655,000 Iraqis and over one million in total, and for a reason never proven, it cannot be just the former British prime minister who is troubled by the lack of information and transparency.

Many believe Blair should be put on trial for his role in taking us to what looks like an increasingly illegal war in Iraq. I would try him for allowing the country to be swamped with millions of new arrivals as, and this fact is absolutely vital to remember, it was not fair to anyone; not those who were already here, those who arrived or those who came along subsequently.

Communities felt they lost their identities, schools were filled to the point that giant cabins were quickly rushed into playgrounds to fit in all the children, many of whom could speak no English, and resentment quickly grew.

In reality, current US troop levels–about 32,000–are actually about what they were when Obama took office (Think Progress, 6/22/11). A graph that accompanied an NPR story (6/29/11) shows this pretty clearly.

Late last year the New York Times offered similarly misleading spin (FAIR Blog, 11/25/13), reporting that Obama “has reduced the forces in Afghanistan from about 100,000 in 2010 to about 47,000 today.” That’s technically true, but ignores the fact that the troop levels had only gotten that high as a result of Obama’s policy of massive escalation.

The issue of giving aid to the Syrian rebels has been widely debated with some concerned that weapons and training will end up in the hands of Islamists who have embedded themselves among the opposition.

Sixty years ago, in June 1954, a CIA-orchestrated coup ousted the reformist Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. The coup installed a brutal right-wing regime and decades of bloody repression.

Russia and China are both under attack by a multi-pronged U.S.-led ‘proto-war’ which could erupt into ‘hot war’ or even nuclear war. ‘Protowar’ or ‘proto-warfare’ is the term I have coined to describe the use of multiple methods intended to weaken, destabilize, and in the limit-case destroy a targeted government without the need to engage in direct military warfare.

On May 11 a plane arrived at Kiev’s airport in strict secrecy; it was met by the airport’s military personnel rather than the civilian staff. NATO military uniforms, 500 packages of amphetamines, and containers marked as poisonous substances were unloaded from the plane. By order of the Kiev directorate of the SBU, the fighters, the cargo and the containers of poison were not inspected and left the airport in cars with tinted windows. The cargo was accompanied by CIA agent Richard Michael. Aboard the plane were also fighters from the Right Sector and the Polish private military company ASBS (Analizy Systemowe Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz) Othago, created several years ago by Poland’s current Minister of the Interior, B. Sienkiewicz.

While the “use of armed [unmanned aircraft systems] is not authorized,” The Washington Times uncovering of a 2010 Pentagon directive on military support to civilian authorities details what critics say is a troubling policy that envisions the Obama administration’s potential use of military force against Americans. As one defense official proclaimed, “this appears to be the latest step in the administration’s decision to use force within the United States against its citizens.” Meet Directive 3025.18 and all its “quelling civil disturbances” totalitarianism…

A SWAT crashed through a family’s door in the middle of the night and threw a concussion grenade into a baby’s playpen. A 19-month-old baby was horribly disfigured when it exploded in his face. [Graphic]

Alecia Phonesavanh and her family were staying at a friend’s house after their home had been lost in a fire. The makeshift living arrangements left their 19-month-old baby boy sleeping in a playpen in a shared room. Things were going OK until the local government decided to send paramilitary home invaders to unleash indiscriminate violence upon the home and anyone inside.

Transparency Reporting

The US was among the first states to congratulate Ukraine’s president-elect Petro Poroshenko. Yet real US opinions of the new president are more complicated, as revealed by WikiLeaks cables which refer to the billionaire as a “disgraced oligarch.”

For years, the US was keeping an eye on the Ukrainian billionaire and former foreign minister. Between 2006 and 2011, Poroshenko’s name was a direct or indirect subject of hundreds of cables released by WikiLeaks.

A simple search for ”Poroshenko” on WikiLeaks’ website gives at least 350 documents mentioning his name. But some of the descriptions provided by US diplomats are far from complimentary.

Last Saturday, the White House accidentally revealed the identity of the CIA’s most senior operative in Kabul by accidentally including his name on a list of officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit to US troops in Afghanistan. Though it was disbursed to more than 6,000 journalists, all indications suggest that every outlet has complied with the government’s request to refrain from publishing the name.

The U.S. government is in the final stages of weighing approval for an overhaul of regulations governing the country’s poultry industry that would see processing speeds increase substantially even while responsibility for oversight would be largely given over to plant employees.

The author of Sons of Wichita, the new biography of the Koch brothers, never got the interviews he wanted with the archconservative billionaires. But he says the family nonetheless kept a close eye on his research, deploying the “very aggressive P.R. operation” they have used for years to silence media criticism.

I attempted to enter Canada on a Tuesday, flying into the small airport at Fort McMurray, Alberta, waiting for my turn to pass through customs.

“What brings you to Fort Mac?” a Canada Border Services Agency official asked. “I’m a journalist,” I said. “I’m here to see the tar sands.” He pointed me to border security. Another official, a tall, clean-shaven man, asked the same question. “I’m here to see the tar sands.” he frowned. “You mean oil sands. We don’t have tar here.”

The list of participants for the 62nd Bilderberg meeting that began in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Thursday includes seven Finns. The annual meeting is an exclusive forum for the political and financial elite of the world to engage in informal, off-the-record discussions on a variety of global issues.

The officially released agenda of the prestigious Bilderberg club meeting is not true, claims RT show host Daniel Estulin, a longtime watcher of the ‘secret world govt’ group. He says he obtained the real agenda for this year’s gathering in Copenhagen.

Thomas Piketty has accused the Financial Times of ridiculous and dishonest criticism of his economics book on inequality, which has become a publishing sensation.

The French economist, whose 577-page tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century has become an unlikely must-read for business leaders and politicians alike, said it was ridiculous to suggest that his central thesis on rising inequality was incorrect.

The controversy blew up when the FT accused Piketty of errors in transcribing numbers, as well as cherry-picking data or not using original sources.

This week, Bill speaks to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who argues that we must reform the tax code and stop subsidizing tax dodgers. A recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness suggests that corporate taxes are near a 60-year low — and that’s partially because corporations have become adept at not paying their share.

Here’s a list of 10 tax-dodging corporations excerpted from the Americans for Tax Fairness report.

Yet another of the world’s central banks has publicly “warned” citizens of Bitcoin. The Argentinian Central Bank has posted a statement about Bitcoin on their official website, warning of the lack of legal tender status, volatility, and Bitcoin’s use in fraudulent activities and money laundering.

Back in the 90s, I used to get into arguments with Russian friends about capitalism. This was a time when most young eastern European intellectuals were avidly embracing everything associated with that particular economic system, even as the proletarian masses of their countries remained deeply suspicious. Whenever I’d remark on some criminal excess of the oligarchs and crooked politicians who were privatising their countries into their own pockets, they would simply shrug.

The percentage of taxes that corporations pay today are near the record lows of the United States’ total tax bill, even though these corporations are bringing in huge profits. Although this is happening, the unemployment rate still remains high. A study completed by the Center for Effective Government and National People’s Action shows the damage done by having corporations pay low taxes and the effect on state budgets. The study shows that a small increase in the amount of taxes large corporations pay will have positive effects such as restoring cuts in education and public services, and could possibly restore over three million jobs. As federal aid was declined to state budgets more and more, many states have cut back on taxes claiming that doing so would benefit their economy and create jobs. One example of this was a tax exemption on corporate profits passed directly to individual owners in the state of Kansas. This kept Kansas in a recession. Hard working employees were stuck with paying the taxes that corporations got out of paying. Corporations get out of paying taxes in loopholes such as offshore tax havens, the “executive pay loophole” that allows corporations to deduct performance bonuses from their tax receipts, and the “stock-based pay loophole” that allows companies to deduct billions from their tax bill. People can see that cutting the taxes of corporations is not helping the economy in any state. It is not helping form jobs, and Americans agree it needs to be stopped.

The taxes paid by corporations today are near record lows as a percentage of the United States’ total tax bill, even as they are recording massive profits. Yet the unemployment rate is still high. However, if we turned back the clock on corporate tax rates and returned to Nixon-era levels and closed loopholes, millions of American jobs would be created, according to The Disappearing Corporate Tax Base, a new report released today.

A national charity whose executives earn six-figure salaries used a legal loophole to pay disabled workers as little as three and four cents an hour, according to documents obtained exclusively by NBC News.

An NBC News investigation recently revealed that Goodwill Industries, which is among the non-profit groups permitted to pay disabled workers far less than minimum wage because of a federal law known as Section 14 (c), had paid workers as little as 22 cents an hour.

Censorship

The MPAA was formed initially in 1922 under the moniker Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. It was created in order to give films at the time a set of standards by which filmmakers would use as a list to make sure that movies wouldn’t depict excessive violence, sexuality or other practices deemed immoral. It was later changed to the Motion Picture Association of America and placed under the direction of Jack Valenti in the mid ‘60s.

An extraordinary commentary published in the New York Times Book Review — posted online May 22, scheduled for print publication June 8 — asserts that the US government must be the final decision-maker on whether leaked information about government wrongdoing should be published by the press.

This anti-democratic screed, worthy of any police state, is written by Michael Kinsley, a longtime fixture of the punditry establishment and the former co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire” program. His commentary takes the form of a review of Glenn Greenwald’s new book No Place to Hide on the Edward Snowden revelations about illegal mass surveillance by the National Security Agency.

Kinsley ridicules Greenwald’s claim that blanket NSA surveillance of electronic communications is a threat to the democratic rights of the American people, and that Snowden was justified in exposing government criminality by leaking documents to Greenwald and other journalists for eventual publication in the Guardian (US) and the Washington Post.

Twitter has a reputation as an open platform for expressing one’s opinions. It’s become a place for dissent and debate. It played a key role in the “Arab Spring” revolutions of the last couple of years.

But last week, it agreed to censor a pro-Ukrainian Twitter feed in Russia. It also blocked a “blasphemous” account in Pakistan. It’s not the first time Twitter has censored politically sensitive accounts. Now, it seems, Twitter’s reputation as a platform for free speech is at risk.

Historically, Cambodia has been fairly lax in enacting legislation that stifles freedom of expression online—unlike its neighbors of Vietnam and Thailand— but with more Cambodian citizens gaining access to the Internet, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) has attempted to control dissenting views and “immoral actions” online through the drafting of a cybercrime law. A leaked copy of the legislation, which was initially drafted in 2012, revealed some serious threats to fundamental freedoms by making certain speech and other actions online punishable by fine and prison time.

Privacy

Smári “Mailpile” McCarthy’s lecture Engineering Our Way Out of Fascism sets out a set of technical, legal and social interventions we can undertake to make mass surveillance impossible, starting with this: “The goal of those interested in protecting human rights should be to raise the average cost of surveillance to $10.000 per person per day within the next five years.”

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had harsh words for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden during a taped interview with NBC News’ David Gregory of Meet the Press.

“The guy should be prosecuted,” Bloomberg said when asked if he thought Snowden a patriot or a traitor. “You cannot have individual people deciding what information should be released. We have a democratic process and my recollection is things like the NSA surveillance, that, well the process worked.”

There is really no getting around the fact that staying secure on the Internet is hard, if not impossible, to achieve. Yes, users can do more to keep themselves safe by adopting good security practices. They can choose strong passwords that they don’t reuse for different sites. They can avoid disclosing personal details online and for users that are particularly security conscious, can encrypt the contents of their hard disks. Ultimately however, users have to rely on the software they are using to be secure, especially security software. If this isn’t the case, then no end of good habits will prevent others from secretly siphoning information they can later exploit.

Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning’s legal cases are destined to be remembered together for as long as their cases are discussed because of the similarities in the cases and their nearly simultaneous evolution which, together, reveal two perspectives on American justice. Nevertheless, the media’s treatment of Manning’s case has been a stark contrast to the manner in which Snowden’s case has been reported. Comparing the two cases reveals a double standard in both the prosecution of the two cases, and in the media’s coverage of those events.

The safest way to store your documents is on your local hard drive, says SmartKlock founder Jason Fernandes, warning that online cloud services leave you open to surveillance and compromise your privacy

Glenn Greenwald has just published “No Place to Hide.” The book, which reads like a thriller, is Greenwald’s story of his nonstop two weeks of work in May and June 2013 in Hong Kong with former CIA agent and NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden. Greenwald coordinated the public release of the 1.7 million pages of NSA documents that Snowden took with him in order to prove definitively that the federal government is spying on all of us all the time.

When the four-hour sit-down between journalist Brian Williams and Snowden made it to air on Wednesday night, NBC condensed roughly four hours of conversation into a 60-minute time slot. During an analysis of the full interview afterwards, however, the network showed portions of the interview that didn’t make it into the primetime broadcast, including remarks from the former National Security Agency contractor in which he questioned the American intelligence community’s inability to stop the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

In response to a question from Williams concerning a “non-traditional enemy,” Al-Qaeda, and how to prevent further attacks from that organization and others, Snowden suggested that United States had the proper intelligence ahead of 9/11 but failed to act.

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents , New York Times reported.

The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is hoarding images of US citizens obtained through communications intercepted in order to use the images for facial recognition programs, confidential documents made public by the New York Times indicate.

Social-media giant Facebook says it will appeal a court ruling that will allow a Vancouver woman to launch a class action lawsuit against the company.

B.C. Supreme Court Judge Susan Griffin ruled yesterday that there is enough evidence to support allegations made by Debbie Douez that a Facebook advertising product used the names and images of members without their consent.

Griffin says the product, called “Sponsored Stories,” included the names and images of members, an advertising logo and product information, which were sent to other Facebook members.

Yesterday, the NSA released an email from Edward Snowden to his superiors asking about the legality of NSA spying, claiming it was the only evidence they had that he ever tried to go through channels before turning leaker; on its face, this is pretty damning. But there’s one problem: six months ago, the NSA claimed that they had no emails of the sort from Snowden, and then this one happened to turn up just in time to counter Snowden’s allegations on US TV that he’d tried to blow the whistle from inside. My guess? Someone as canny as Snowden kept copies of all the communiques he made and flags he raised, and will be shortly making the NSA look like pathetic liars (again).

German media has reported that the country’s foreign intelligence agency wants to access social media in real time. The agency reportedly wants to expand digital operations out of fear of falling behind other countries.

Numerous documents focusing on partnerships and surveillance tactics between America’s National Security Agency and regional security apparatus’ in the Middle East, especially the Gulf region, will be released soon, according to the journalist leading the reporting on the explosive NSA leaks.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal court today that there was no doubt that the government has destroyed years of evidence of NSA spying – the government itself has admitted to it in recent court filings. In a brief filed today in response to this illegal destruction, EFF is asking that the court make an “adverse inference” that the destroyed evidence would show that plaintiffs communications and records were in fact swept up in the mass NSA spying programs.

“We were a clear demonstration that official channels didn’t work,” said William Binney, one of a trio of National Security Agency employees who tired to “blow the whistle” on the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities more than a decade before Edward Snowden delivered classified documents from the agency’s files to The Guardian. Binney, now retired, resigned from the NSA in 2001. A year later he and two of his former colleagues asked Congress and the Department of Defense for an investigation of the agency for wasting money and violating privacy rights with a massive data collection program called “Trailblazer,” the successor to an earlier program dubbed “Stellar Wind.” Binney believes that’s the reason why the FBI five years later staged an armed raid of his home.

“Stellar Wind was the basic reason I left the NSA in 2001,” Binney said in a recent interview with Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine. “That’s when they started to take the program that I created to do social network reconstruction of anybody in the world, and direct it against everybody in the United States. That means they were basically putting a PEN register on every phone number in the United States. They call it trace-and-tap, where they put this device on your line and I can monitor who you call, how long you call them.”

Since breaking the National Security Agency spying story for The (London) Guardian last year, Glenn Greenwald has been the target of attacks from fellow journalists who seem to labor under the delusion that it’s their job to protect the government.

Soon after he reported revelations of government malfeasance provided by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, NBC’s David Gregory asked Greenwald, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden … why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?”

More broadly, the United States justifies the lawfulness of its communications surveillance by reference to distinctions that, considering modern communications technology, are irrelevant to truly protecting privacy in a modern society. The US relies on the outmoded distinction between “content” and “metadata,” falsely contending that the latter does not reveal private facts about an individual. The US also contends that the collection of data is not surveillance—it argues, contrary to both international law and the Principles, that an individual’s privacy rights are not infringed as long as her communications data are not analyzed by a human being. It’s clear that the practice of digital surveillance by the United States has overrun the bounds of human rights standards. What our paper hopes to show is exactly where the country has crossed the line, and how its own politicians and the international community might rein it back.

Given the agency’s history of making claims that turn out to be not quite accurate, it’s worth taking the NSA’s claim with a grain of salt. But the NSA’s response to Snowden also has a deeper problem: it wouldn’t have made a difference if Snowden had raised his concerns more forcefully through internal channels.

Remember, the NSA’s position is that it hasn’t done anything wrong. The agency claims that its domestic surveillance programs comply with the law, and that it gets plenty of oversight from both the courts and Congress. The NSA has stuck to this position despite a year of pressure from Congress and the public. Why would it have been any more receptive to the concerns of a lowly contractor?

As we’ve mentioned, the USA Freedom Act — which had been the “good” bill to reform some of the NSA’s domestic spying activities — was completely watered down right before it passed the House. Basically the entire civil liberties community pulled their support for the bill at the last minute once they saw the changes that the White House demanded (even after the bill had already been watered down). What got a little less attention was that many in the tech industry had also dropped their support for the bill, despite earlier supporting it.

On that occasion, McCarthy was citing the Internal Revenue Service abuses of his time “in which privacy, due process, equal protection of the law, and the principal of innocence until proven guilty are not protected, and actions traditionally disapproved in the United States” are violated by Washington agencies.

If the maverick-minded McCarthy was on the scene in our own time, he would no doubt also include the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens as representing a similar danger.

The CIA’s non-profit venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, has been pumping millions of dollars into technology startups since its launch in 2000, meaning it’s not the least bit unusual for major vendors to have acquired and assimilated one of these CIA-nurtured seedlings.

China says that the US has spied on Chinese companies, research institutes and mobile phone users, and has also highlighted the role of high-tech companies like Cisco and Microsoft in supporting US intelligence, in a government report published on 26 May and in its news media.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today released an April 2013 email exchange between then-NSA contractor Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency’s Office of General Counsel.

Joe Nachio, the former chief of Denver-based Qwest Communications who was convicted on more than a dozen counts of insider trading and sent to prison for nearly five years, says the National Security Agency first blackballed his company, then federal authorities refused to allow him to explain his side when he was on trial.

During a live webcast on NBCNews.com immediately following Wednesday’s 10 p.m. ET airing of his interview with Edward Snowden, Nightly News anchor Brian Williams wondered why the National Security Agency was not more receptive to Snowden’s claims of unconstitutional spying: “Knowing that in war powers times…the Bush administration use of war powers with Bush and Cheney, isn’t the general counsel at the NSA a little bit on guard for a perversion, as Snowden put it?” [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

The NSA is thought to deploy the TAO unit for specific hard-to-get targets — for example, to hack systems, tap cellular phone networks, or intercept routers and servers at shipping ports — in order to implant them with surveillance devices.

When journalist Glenn Greenwald and the co-authors of last week’s article in The Intercept wrote about the latest US National Security Agency spy operation to be leaked, they alleged that the NSA has been collecting the contents seemingly of all cell phone calls dialed or received in two nations: the Bahamas, and an unnamed “country X.” After scolding The Intercept for withholding the name of that second country, WikiLeaks alleged on Friday that the other subject of the previously unreported NSA program was Afghanistan.

“WikiLeaks has confirmed that the identity of victim state is Afghanistan,” editor-in-chief Julian Assange wrote. “This can also be independently verified through forensic scrutiny of imperfectly applied censorship on related documents released to date and correlations with other NSA programs.”

According to WikiLeaks, there may be much more to the story. Also last week, the anti-secrecy group tweeted that Jared Cohen — the 32-year-old current director of Google Ideas and a former US State Department advisor — has a history that connects him to a program that may have put Afghan signals intelligence, or SIGINT, into the hands of US investigators.

Soon after that the Snowden leaks were revealed on June 9 2013. While there may have not been a causation, there probably is a strong correlation, because people realised that the NSA are not-something-to-be-afraid-of, harmful, incompetent, and useless. While the Snowden revelations are probably actual, many of them are likely the deluded products of people with Manias, Schizophrenia or Clinical depression, which I believe most people at the NSA have developed due to the inherently secret, selfish, and dishonest, nature of their work there (see “Publish or Perish” = “Life or Death”). So it’s hard to know what is factual and what is a delusion without the NSA being placed under scrutiny and forced to publish their findings for the world at large (not just the USA).

Research, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust to mark the one year anniversary of Edward Snowdon revealing the activities of UK and US intelligence agencies, showed 85% believe it is “fairly important”, “very important” or “essential” to keep browsing records private. Only 12% believe it is not important, the survey conducted by Ipsos Mori showed.

After NBC confirmed Ed Snowden’s earlier claims that he had tried to make use of internal channels to question NSA surveillance programs, James Clapper released a single email from Snowden to the legal department at the NSA, which they claim shows he never actually raised these issues. Snowden quickly responded, noting that this is not the only email, that he raised the issue more directly with his supervisors… and, most importantly, that none of this really matters.

Stewart Baker is still defending the NSA, but his latest piece advancing the agency’s cause deploys a particularly disingenuous argument. He feels the American Bar Association acted hypocritically when it sent a letter to the NSA asking it to respect attorney-client privilege.

Civil Rights

The following letter was sent to Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth on behalf of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire; former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans von Sponeck; current UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Richard Falk; and over 100 scholars.

The evolution of immigration and border control policy in Greece and its interdependence with European funding suggests an agenda which has been decided above national legislatures with strong coordination between European political actors and economic interests, while ignoring the human suffering it produces.

As thousands took to the streets this weekend to protest the civil and military dictatorship – which left a legacy of some of the most sadistic and brutal repression against political prisoners seen in Latin America – the military police have unleashed a new war on the poor of Brazil, and the State is preparing to enforce new “anti-terrorism” laws which raise legitimate fears that they will bring back the practices of the fascist dictatorship. (Note: On March 22nd, Brazilian fascists called for protests under the slogan “march for family.” They were a failure, much like the white man march in North America. In some places, groups of six or less people participated.)

Military police violently cracked down on a teachers protest using tear gas and batons in front of the State Department of Education building, on Wednesday afternoon. The confrontation happened after a teacher used a marker. to write “Education Strike” in the wall. Teachers had walked the Avenida Presidente Vargas to the location after another demonstration in front of the administrative building of the town hall, where police also used tear gas to remove teachers that closed the route.

In what is being touted as a victory for First Amendment rights, the First Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the right of people to record police officers in public. This is nothing more than a reaffirmation of a right citizens already possessed, something that can hardly be considered a victory.

The problem is that, despite this being made clear on multiple occasions, people are still being arrested for recording police officers. Sometimes it’s a bad (and outdated) wiretapping law that gets abused. Sometimes it’s other, unrelated laws that are stretched to fit the circumstances, which means those recording officers are hit with charges ranging from interfering with police investigations to criminal mischief, depending on how the interaction goes.

A bill advancing in Kansas would mandate reporting for miscarriages at any stage in pregnancy, the first step along the path to criminalizing pregnant women’s bodies. Under an amendment attached to HB 2613 — which was originally intended to update the state’s procedure for issuing birth certificates for stillborn babies — doctors would be required to report all of their patients’ miscarriages to the state health department.

Based on the true story of ‘San Jose Mercury News’ reporter Gary Webb and the fallout from his expose on how the Nicaraguan Contras, with the help of the CIA, smuggled cocaine into California to fund their rebel agenda, this looks like a thriller with brains. There’s even the subtext that comes with a flood of crack into the inner city, and the conspiracy theorizing over the government targeting people of color. Also featuring Rosemarie DeWitt, Ray Liotta, Barry Pepper, Michael Sheen, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Platt, Andy Garcia, Tim Blake Nelson, Robert Patrick, Michael Kenneth Williams, and Paz Vega, the trailer is intriguing.

A defense attorney for a waterboarded prisoner urged an Army judge on Wednesday to not take back a bold order to disclose details of the CIA’s black site program, likening the judge to Watergate’s Judge John Sircia, whose bravery toppled the presidency of Richard M. Nixon.

Late last night, after many reporters had stopped watching (or in my case, left the city), the House of Representatives delivered a surprise. It passed an amendment delivered by the reliable anti-war-on-drugs Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, one that would prevent the DEA from using funds to break up medical marijuana operations in the states where they’re operating legally.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Faced with difficult questions about his company’s pending takeover of Time Warner Cable — which would combine the two largest cable internet providers in the U.S. into a company consumers will likely hate twice as much — Comcast CEO Brian Roberts made one thing very clear: his company is determined to sit directly in the middle of the tech world.

Intellectual Monopolies

MakerBot is one of the key companies in the low-cost 3D printing market. It was founded in 2009 and based its first model on the completely open RepRap design. However, in 2012, MakerBot moved away from its open source roots, claiming that it needed to make this shift in order to build a long-term business:

We are going to be as open as we possibly can while building a sustainable business. We are going to continue to respect licenses and continue to contribute to the open technology of 3D printing, some of which we initiated. We don’t want to abuse the goodwill and support of our community. We love what we do, we love sharing, and we love what our community creates.

In a stunning display of madness, makerbot industries files a patent application on a mechanism clearly derived from content created by their users. What’s almost worse is the article they wrote praising the invention, presumably while they were filing the paperwork.

As Techdirt has been charting, the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations have already encountered far more resistance than was expected when they began last year. This has mostly centered around the controversial corporate sovereignty provisions, but there are also more general concerns about things like deregulation — for example, through a new regulatory council. As well as pushback from expected quarters — civil organizations and NGOs (pdf) — even some European governments are expressing their doubts. And following last week’s elections for the European Parliament, a new obstacle to concluding the agreement has been added: an increased number of European politicians (MEPs) that are skeptical about pan-European projects in general, and TAFTA/TTIP.

Copyrights

In April, we wrote about an important court ruling in Spain that found that Pablo Soto’s P2P file sharing software, Blubster, was “perfectly legal”, because the software was “neutral” and a part of “free enterprise within the framework of a market economy.” In that post, we went through the entire history of earlier court rulings that had similarly suggested that file sharing software shouldn’t be blamed for how people used it, and the US’s aggressive pressure that forced Spain to pass multiple new copyright laws to try to reverse such rulings. All of that appeared to be for nothing, as the courts still recognized the silliness of blaming software for how people use it.

Yesterday, the music labels, under the guise of RIAA spinoff SoundExchange, along with Congressional Reps. George Holding and John Conyers, announced some new legislation and a coordinated PR campaign for what they’re calling “Project72.” The official name of the bill is the “Respecting Senior Performers as Essential Cultural Treasures Act” or the RESPECT Act. There is so much hypocrisy and ridiculousness here that it’s difficult to know where to start. However, in short, the labels fought hard to keep the situation the way it is today, and a very large number of the musicians the RIAA rolled out in “support” of this new law — claiming they just want to get paid by music streaming services — are musicians who got totally screwed over by RIAA labels in the past. How about a little “respect”?

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3 Comments

Hi there, Dr. Roy.
First of all, thanks for this amazing site. It’s my homepage since a few years, i read it every day, use it as source of information, and usually quote data from here in other places. I found it invaluable.

I would like to ask about your opinion on Yoani Sánchez, as it was cited in a link here.

I’m latin american, and we know very well this kind of people around here. She’s undoubtely being censored, but she’s also a right-wing media supported pro-USA so called “journalist” of the same kind of all the pro-Microsoft people you note in Techrights every week. She speaks of “freedom” in Cuba the same way Microsoft does in Software around the world: by telling lies and/or half truths, by deceiving and being hypocrital. AND she’s being censored.

Cuba is not heaven, but neither is the USA, and while USA’s speaks of freedom and right-wing media gives prizes to Sánchez work in the name of human rights, the situation is a lot more complicated than that in Cuba or in the rest of the world.

I believe she should speak, and Cuba’s population should answer; i don’t believe Censorship is the way to go. However, i don’t have any injerency on the fate of one of the few socialists nations in the world, which everyday resists the Capital’s pressure, and don’t know what would i do in such a place.

So, do you believe it’s a good idea to spread Sánchez propaganda, because she’s actually being censored? That link you post here almost displays her as a hero, which is certainly not. It’s kinda like saying that Bill Gates is some kind of hero if he says Cuba’s childs should have computers to access internet, and he gets censored by cuban goverment. Sánchez may not be on the same level, but i don’t find it so different anyway.

Thanks for the kind words and thanks for making use of this site. I am merely trying to make it be like a service, just sharing what I find along the way (filtering out nonsense like celebrities and pointless political partisanship).

I would like to start by stating, quite humbly in fact, that I don’t know much about Cuba’s political atmosphere. Cuba was the centre of attention before I was born and it sure seems like it’s somewhat marginalised by the English-speaking media these days (also in the United States’ little brothers, such as the UK). I hardly ever hear about Cuba, except when there’s bad news or some cult of personalities debacle (about the Castros).

What I know about Cuba is based on movies I saw with family. I had some relatives there, but they escaped to Miami after Castro has taken over. Some also escaped to Florida from PR. Their memory of Castro wasn’t fond; he confiscated their business. Communism didn’t work well for them personally.

Putting aside the notorious CIA operations in Cuba, the nuclear tensions etc. (old news), I recently read about what USAID had done in Cuba. I was astonished but not totally surprised. I also read about some famous blogger there being gagged (that goes back a decade ago and might be the same person you allude to); I am strongly against all kinds of gags. I am in favour of trolls and bad people speaking out so that we can publicly respond and expose them. The power of one’s speech can defeat another’s (e.g. racists), so I’m all in favours of letting idiots and “useful idiots” speak out. They would enjoy a certain allure if people were so desperate that they got their opposition gagged. It’s a sort of Streisand Effect.

Anyway, cutting to the chase, I positioned the link about Cuba next to a link that relates to it. It’s not accident. But I later mistakenly buffered it apart with another link later on (NYTimes link). I wanted it to aptly fit next to Wales’ views on censorship (remember he was involved in some adult sites and fought censorship before Wikipedia, just as Jacob Appelbaum had done before Wikileaks). Wales correctly responds to silly European politicians who think that censoring the Web though search results is doable; they don’t quite grasp technology; likewise, I think Cuba would only amplify “hostile” bloggers’ voice if it thinks that simple bans can do the job. Look at The Pirate Bay. That too, despite heavy lobbying and police overreach, is a games of whack-a-mole.

Censorship does not work. Well, it doesn’t quite work as one intends (overall). Likewise, crushing protests doesn’t quite work. It leads to people viewing the police as the enemy, radicalising them further (as in Arab Spring). If you don’t let bloggers or protesters speak out, you drive them underground and it blows up, metaphorically or physically. In a way, censoring of bloggers in Cuba serves the CIA agenda of portraying Cuba’s leaders as dangerous oppressors. Just look what they tried to do twice in the past decade in Venezuela.

Cuba should let the provocateur speak as the government can also speak back, showing what’s really happening and who’s behind it. Venezuela did that and I think it’s one of the few Latin American countries to have successfully staved off a coup.

I don’t know if Cuba is still under the threat of covert operations (I read about quite a lot of assassination attempts in Cuba but not so recently). Either way, I’m sure there are still “plans” for Cuba. See that recent interview where a former CIA asset/student in Latin America exposed what he had been involved in. I’m pretty sure you have seen it.

I agree on (and share) your political position. I just sometimes doubt if it isn’t possible to think this way just because we see things from the outside. Whatever the case, i guess the ethical path is clear.

Oh, for the record: i’m argentinian, not cuban. I’m also 32, so i (fortunately) avoided the worst of the cold war around here. We had a very bloody decade on the 70′s here, as did other south american countries more or less at the same time. Cuba was an example for the communist side of the struggle, and still somehow it is. So, right-wing politicians use Cuba here (and in the rest of latin america) as an example of… well, kinda “the work of the devil”: and as more time passes, younger people knows less and less about the cold war times.

I understood the point of the link wasn’t about Sánchez but about the futility or counterproductivity of censorship and the role of technical knowledge for the matter. But that was part of the thing that took my atention. It’s a problem i feel from my point of view.

Almost every anti-colonialist party in latin america (not only in Argentina) goes to nationalists ideas and takes simbols regarding things like “the roots of our land”, which are commonly even contrary to the idea of embracing technology. Because we don’t have anything like “our” technology: we don’t make international standars, we don’t have an Intel or AMD here, we work for Oracle, Microsoft, IBM… we even have to be thankful when we have access to cheap slave-made chinesse replicas of some other tech, given our neccesary market protectionism.

Corporate press uses this, saying that the rest of the world is a better place because they have access to garbage like Apple stuff (thank god we don’t have that crap here) or because they can “irrestrictly” use twitter from their mobile phone and share pictures took at the local Starbucks, and freely blog, and stuff like that. “American standar of living” seems to be the idea.

So, i can see how in the day to day basis the right-wing is successful in capitalize the discourse of technology; part because they seem to show something cool, and part because they keep on polarizing between “the way of USA or your childish substandar native way” (it’s not casual to see the USA’s flag in venezuelan opposition marchs). I don’t know how to put it right in english (i speak spanish), but the point is i feel this “censored bloggers” are exactly what the corporate press is constantly looking for. They pretend to portrait the socialists nations as substandar, underdeveloped, and tyranical, in contrast of some kind of “common sense” that rules the rest of the world. And, obviously, any kind of anti-colonialism is portrayed as childish, contrary to history facts, and pseudo-communism (as they usually try to do with Free Software).

This is not new, nor surprising. But i find this combo tragical. Because technology IS a way to change things, a lot of things are happening around technology, and here in south america is specially damaging given our relation with technology AND socialism.

So, i feel portraying Cuba as a tyranical censor with little knowledge of technology and the opposition as heroic survivors of hell is exactly what the corporate press is looking to sell while they keep lobbing for their own flavour of censorship trying to make of the internet a new Cable TV.

I know very well you’re not doing anything like that, i know your point is another one (well stated in your answer). This is just a personal doubt (if it’s ok to post a link like that as an example of the problems of censorship) i’d liked to share somewhere somebody could understand.

I find it tricky, like the problem of free software inside weapons, or biometrics, or complex matters like those.
I guess, however, as i said at the beginning, the ethical path is clear.

Microsoft's charm offensives against Free/libre software are proving to be rather effective, despite them involving a gross distortion of facts and exploitation of corruptible elements in the corporate media

A British MEP criticises Battistelli and the management of the European Patent Office (EPO) while Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, UK Minister for Intellectual Property, gets closer to Battistelli in a tactless effort to improve relations